A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W XYZ
Pauline Kael
In this country we encourage “creativity” among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow “too much.”
Henry Kaiser
Problems are just opportunities in work clothes.
Immanual Kant (1724 – 1804)
Man is the only creature which must be educated. On Pedagogy 1803
Abraham Kaplan
Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
Bel Kaufman (1911-
Good teachers, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are alike everywhere.
Do you know any other business or profession where highly-skilled [sic] specialists are required to tally numbers, alphabetize cards, put notices into mailboxes, and patrol the lunchroom?
Ellen Kay (1849-1926) American teacher.
At every step a child should be allowed to meet the real experiences of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.
Elia Kazan
A man is what he does and does well. That’s the one thing I learned in my life.
Robert Kegan
A good problem will gather you up at your tender, growing edge and change who you are.
John Keats
There is a saying, ‘Well begun is half done’ – ’tis a bad one. I would use instead, ‘Not begun at all until half done.’
There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.
Garret Keizer
Kids undergo transformations that make the metamorphoses in Ovid or the plagues in Exodus look mundane.
Helen Keller (1880-1968)
The highest result of education is tolerance.
I was only a little mass of possibilities. It was my teacher [Annie Sullivan] who unfolded and developed them . . . She never since let pass an opportunity . . . to make my life sweet and useful.
A child’s mind is like a shallow brook which ripples and dances merrily over the stony course of its education and reflects here a flower, there a bush, yonder a fleecy cloud . . .
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows.
Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
Never bend your head, always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Daniel Kemmis
I wonder if we wouldn’t become more gracefully productive by recognizing that we are all living cells within the living organisms like cities, bioregions, continents, and the earth itself. Could we lessen our stress, become healthier and more whole, if we saw our work as simply helping these organisms realize their own living wholeness?”
John F. Kennedy 1917 – 1963
Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.
Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.
The human mind is our fundamental resource.
It is our task in our time and in our generation to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours.
A child miseducated is a child lost.
Modern cynics and skeptics . . . see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.
Dealing with bureaucracy is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.
Robert F. Kennedy
Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.
Rose Kennedy
I looked on child rearing not only as work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best I could bring to it.
Elizabeth Kenny
It’s better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.
Francis Keppel
Education is too important to be left solely to the educators.
Jean Kerr
The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.
Ellen Key
Fathers and mothers must bow their heads in the dust before the exalted nature of the child. Until they see that the word “child” is only another expression for the conception of majesty; until they feel that it is the future which in the form of a child sleeps in their arms, and history which plays at their feet, they will not understand that they have as little power or right to prescribe laws for this new being as they possess the power or might to lay down paths for the stars.
The Education of the Child
For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life. The Century of the Child (1909)
At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experiences of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses. The Century of the Child (1909)
The time will come in which the child will be looked upon as holy, even when the parents themselves have approached the mystery of life with profane feelings; a time in which all motherhood will be looked upon as holy, if it is caused by a deep emotion of love, and if it has called forth deep feelings of duty.
John Maynard Keynes
I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimize rather than with those who would maximize, economic entanglement between nations. Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel – these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and above all, let finance be primarily national.
J. Robby Kidd (Quoting a taxi driver in New York)
If you don’t have a college education, you sure have to use your brains.
Walter Kiechel III
The best discipline, maybe the only discipline that really works, is self discipline.
Sören Kierkegaard
What is really important in education is not that the child learns this and that, but that the mind is matured, that energy is aroused.
Lois LaPointe Kiely teacher
All children like to laugh. Laughing with students is great fun and is not against the board of education’s behavior code. More teachers should try it.
Florence King (On her first day in kindergarten)
I wasn’t used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child, too. I hadn’t known that before; I thought I was just short.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – 1968)
Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.
Thank God for the maladjusted child.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.
If a man is called to be a street sweeper, should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
If you want to move people, it has to be toward a vision that’s positive for them, that taps important values, that gets them something they desire, and it has to be presented in a compelling way that they feel inspired to follow.
Everybody can be great . . . because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
Rudyard Kipling
He who can reach a child’s heart can reach the world’s heart.
Henry Kissinger
In crisis, the most daring course is often the safest.
Felix Klein
Mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs.
Paul Klite
When we see violent imagery over and over it works the same way as a Toyota commercial. It sells that image.
Ronald Knox
A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no responsibility at the other.
Ed Koch
But enough about me. Let’s talk about you and what you think about me.
Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) English writer
The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Herbert Kohl
One of the beauties of teaching is that there is no limit to one’s growth as a teacher, just as there is no knowing beforehand how much your students can learn.
Nobody starts out as a completely effective and creative teacher . . . The desire to teach and the ability to teach well are not the same thing. With the rarest of exceptions, one has to learn how to become a good teacher.
Senator Kohl, from the U.S. Senate Hearing: “Crisis in Math and Science Education.”
There are young people out there cutting raw cocaine with chemicals from the local hardware store. They are manufacturing new highs and new products buy soaking marijuana in ever changing agents, and each of these new drugs is more addictive, more deadly and less costly than the last. How is it that we have failed to tap that ingenuity, that sense of experimentation? How is it that these kids who can measure grams and kilos and can figure out complex monetary transactions cannot pass a simple math or chemistry test?
Alfie Kohn
I’ll tell you something I’ve noticed from visiting a lot of American schools, the more traditional the teacher, the grimmer the mood.
Teaching the whole child requires that we accept students for who they are rather than for what they do.
If some children matter to us more than others, then all children are valued only conditionally.
Bad teaching doesn’t just happen. It’s practically demanded by systemic factors.
. . . teachers who felt controlled became more controlling, removing virtually any opportunities for students to direct their own learning.
If there is a unifying theme in all of these prescriptions and a common characteristic of the very best classrooms, it is that kids are being taken seriously.
As Dewey put it, “Nothing is more absurd than to suppose that there is no middle term between leaving a child to his own unguided fancies and likes, or controlling his activities by a formal succession of dictated directions.” Piaget’s followers are equally critical of the Romantic sensibility attributed to them by traditionalists. Indeed, that sensibility seems to show up only in conservative polemics, where it is kept alive as a way of making the Old School look attractive by contrast.
When a teacher complains that students are “off task” – a favorite bit of educational jargon – the behaviorist will leap to the rescue with a program to get them back “on” again. The more reasonable response to this complaint is to ask, “What’s the task?” Not surprisingly, this way of framing the problem meets with considerable resistance on the part of many educators. More than once I have been huffily informed that life isn’t always interesting, and kids had better learn to deal with this fact. . . . Thus is the desire to control children, or the unwillingness to create a worthwhile curriculum, rationalized as being in the best interests of the students.
E.L. Konigsburg
I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them.
Michael Korda
The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you’re playing by other people’s rules, while quietly playing by your own.
Linda Kossler teacher
I don’t want to spend every day with a pencil and paper when there are so many other things – dance, music, art – to use.
Jonathan Kozol (American author)
More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.
They [children] are strong in their faith in God, they believe in the decency of others, and they are not yet soiled by the knowledge that their country doesn’t like them.
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
All of our children ought to be allowed a stake in the enormous richness of America.
Many teachers . . . would like to tell themselves that education can be nonpolitical and neutral. It is not now. It has not been before. It will not be after we have finished with the struggles of our times.
Karl Kraus
Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
J. Krishnamurti 1895 – 1986 Indian philosopher
When you have that seed [education], and it is flowering here, then you will keep it going all your life. But if this doesn’t operate, then the world will destroy you.
The world makes you what it wants you to be; a cunning animal . . .
The world is that way, deceptive, the deceiving politicians, the money-minded . . If you are not properly educated you’ll just slip into it. So what do you think is education? It is to help you fit into the mechanism o the present order, or disorder of things? Or do you think it should be something else?
Learning is the very essence of humility, learning from everything and from everybody. There is no hierarchy in learning.
Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.
The function of education is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but be yourself all the time.
True education is to learn how to think, not what to think.
When you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.
The function of education is to give the student abundant knowledge in the various fields of human endeavor and at the same time to free his mind from all tradition so that he is able to investigate, to find out, to discover. Otherwise the mind becomes mechanical, burdened with the machinery of knowledge.
Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970) If You Don’t Mind Me Saying (1964)
It is . . . sometimes easier to head an institute for the study of child guidance than it is to turn one brat into a decent human being.
Ray Kurzweil
“What we really need to give our kids is the ability to create knowledge . . . whether it’s music, writing, art, work – it’s becoming increasingly important. . . we should really foster children to pursue their own talents and develop them in their own unique ways. The only way to create knowledge is to have a passion for something. People should pursue their passions.”